Facebook Now Has a Donate Button

This is the time of year when many people consider donating money to charities. Now, you can do that directly through Facebook. This week, Facebook started rolling out a brand new feature called Donate. It allows Facebook users to do more than simply click “like” to indicate that they support a particular charity.

The Donate feature is being used on Facebook with several non-profit charities right now. They include: Oxfam America, Donors Choose, LIVESTRONG Foundation, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Water.org, The Nature Conservancy, Malaria No More, Girls Inc., World Wildlife Fund, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, ASPCA, RAINN, St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, American Cancer Society, Blue Star Families, UNICEF, Kiva, United Nations World Food Programme, and The Red Cross. More may be added in the future.

The Donate feature will appear in your News Feed next to posts made by these participating non-profit groups. You can also find the Donate feature at the top of the Facebook page of these organizations. Other non-profit groups that want to have access to the Donate feature need to fill out the Donate interest form in the Facebook Help Center.

A Facebook user can click on the “Donate” button and choose how much money he or she wants to donate to a specific organization. Payment will be made via credit card.

TechCrunch points out that the Donate feature will allow Facebook to collect credit card numbers and other billing from Facebook users. The LA Times notes that 100% of the money that users donate will go to the organization they wanted to donate to.